It was just under five years ago, on September 13th 2015 that AMD summoned the world’s top technology press to an event in Austin Texas to witness the arrival of their new and highly anticipated Bulldozer architecture processors. What they saw was a new world record CPU frequency as Finnish overclocker Sami ‘macci’ Mäkinen pushed an AMD FX chip to new heights, hitting 8.429GHz. Here’s what Massman wrote back in 2011:

“On August 31, an AMD FX processor achieved a Guiness World Record with a frequency of 8.429GHz, a stunning result for a modern, multi-core processor. The record was achieved with several days of preparation and an amazing and inspired run in front of world renowned technology press in Austin, Texas.”

It’s actually quite fitting to relive the events of five years ago as history appears to be repeating itself in many ways. Back in August 2011 AMD’s Bulldozer launch was heralded by many as an indication that the company once again had the chops to compete with Intel in the high-performance desktop PC space. Unfortunately the arrival of Bulldozer, although it was decent architecture at the time, did not provide the basis of a renaissance. Subsequent Piledriver and Steamroller updates did very little to push the boundaries of performance while Intel followed up with significant performance gains with each generation.

Today we stand on the brink of the arrival of AMD’s Zen architecture CPUs. I seriously hope that history does not repeat itself and that AMD can find its way back in the performance race. Check out the original article from 2011 here.